Liz Truss is finished. Her authority as prime minister is spent. The government she formed six weeks ago no longer exists and Britain needs a general election to choose a new one. Last week, the chancellor was sacked for enacting the prime minister’s will in a “mini-budget” that destroyed the UK’s credibility on global markets. On Wednesday, Suella Braverman, the home secretary, left the cabinet too, ostensibly over a security breach, although the departure suggests more profound clashes over policy and personnel at the heart of government.
No 10 has lost control. Neither of the replacement secretaries of state in Whitehall’s two most powerful departments – Jeremy Hunt at the Treasury and Grant Shapps at the Home Office – backed Ms Truss’s campaign over the summer. Her project is over. Discipline has collapsed. The cabinet is a caretaker administration, minding the shop while a new leader is chosen. Except Ms Truss is somehow still there. That anomaly must be ended.
Some Tory MPs have been reluctant to act, fearing that a mishandled transition could precipitate a general election that would cost the Conservatives dozens of seats. Another factor is the need to avoid a leadership contest that might put the choice of a replacement prime minister back in the hands of grassroots Tory members. They elected Ms Truss over the summer, and so their judgment on such matters is deemed unsound.
In other words, Britain is expected to endure dysfunctional and negligent government in order that a regime with no authority and a threadbare mandate can think of some way to reinforce its failing grip on power. Inaction is a symptom of weakness that also expresses an arrogance with power. It compounds the injury already inflicted on the country by the imposition of Ms Truss as prime minister in the first place. It was Tory members who confirmed her appointment, but Tory MPs who put her on the ballot. They cheered the disastrous “mini-budget” that has led directly to higher government borrowing costs and blasted a hole in public finances.
Ms Truss’s ideas are responsible for making almost everyone in the UK poorer, but she did not keep them secret over the summer. It is the whole Conservative party that bears responsibility now for trashing the UK’s credentials as a creditworthy nation, heaping financial pain on struggling households, undermining the fiscal foundations of public services, and pushing already vulnerable people deeper into poverty. Ms Truss has already packed a lot of misrule into a short time. She must not be given any longer to do worse.
There is no prospect of the prime minister’s performance improving. In parliament on Wednesday she sowed confusion over pensions policy, confirming the triple lock spending commitment that the chancellor had suggested might be abandoned. Whatever stability has been gained by shredding the plans that Ms Truss carried with her into Downing Street is jeopardised for as long as the author of the calamity is still in residence there. It is now a matter of national interest that the country be led by someone capable. If the process that gets us there is an election, so much the better. The new prime minister would have a proper mandate.
What must not be allowed is a long period of chaos and paralysis as the last drops of authority are wrung out of this ragged government. There is no justification for keeping Ms Truss in Downing Street, and a Tory replacement would not stop the rot. She is the immediate problem, but the party that put her in power has forfeited the right to name a successor. That choice should be made by the British people.
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